The stars were not right. This fact was burned into the minds of every human being living on the ruin we called planet Earth. Once, the stars were white pinpricks of light against a black sky. They were comforting guides to astronomers, lovers, and sailors. The little dots of light hinted at vistas that humanity might one day visit. Those are not the stars of tonight’s world. The stars I’d grown up with, which hung above me this evening, were red, orange, and yellow burning orbs that pulsated and hummed with eldritch energies. Sometimes the night sky was black, other times white, and others still colors not meant for human eyes.
Billions of years ago, the alien gods known as the Great Old Ones descended from the sky to claim our still primordial world as their own. Entering an epoch-long hibernation, they and their servant races slept as the world evolved around them. A dozen sentient races lived, and went extinct before the rise of humanity. In the Twenty-First century, the Great Old Ones had reclaimed the Earth and humanity was reduced to small tribes, scattered towns, and bandit gangs.
It was like the Old West Reborn, though I supposed it was a New East given we lived in the ruins of Massachusetts. Every year, it seemed humanity drifted closer and closer to extinction with no end in sight. The stars were the most visible sign of the Great Old Ones’ presence, altering the very fabric of the universe with as causal a thing as a thought. Was it possible to survive in such a place where light, which should not have reached our world from distant solar systems for millions of years, now changed every second? I couldn’t say. It was a heavy set of thoughts for a caravan guard.
“Booth?” a voice called at my side. I stared up into the endless void above me. We were lying on rocky Earth in dusty plains far to the north of the city we called our home.
“Yes, Mercury?”
Mercury Halsey was one of my few remaining comforts. A short flame-haired woman of mixed Japanese and Caucasian descent, she had a thin, angular face with skin just recently weather-beaten from the sun. Mercury was not the sort of person one expected to survive in the harshness of the Wasteland. Appearances could be deceiving, though, and in Mercury’s case she was silk hiding steel.
Though she looked like either a merchant or scholar, Mercury was the former chief torturer for the recently overthrown New Arkham government. As a scientist, she’d been made to use her knowledge of healing to torment instead. In the end, she’d revolted and fled with me into the Wasteland. We’d been traveling together for almost a year and had become lovers—a development expected by everyone but me.
Mercury lay on a sleep roll beside me, her small body tucked under the blankets. I took a moment to admire it and wish we weren’t currently celibate thanks to my “condition.” Behind us, there were beaten-down carts and composite cars made from a hundred different vehicles being used to haul freight and drive cattle from Kingsport to New Arkham.
Creatures the locals called horses, but were a wide variety of strange mutated animals of a quad or hexahedral nature, also rode as part of the caravan. Dozens of humans were asleep or standing watch around us, a mixture of workers and guards like myself. Mercury was the caravan’s medic. The two of us had been intent on changing the world, but we’d somehow ended up becoming traders instead.
“What are you thinking about?” Mercury asked. Though we were resting, she wore rough denim and goggles around her neck. Given the potential dangers of the Wasteland, we had to sleep lightly and wake instantly, ready for action at any given moment.
“The stars,” I admitted.
Mercury looked up. “Yeah, I suppose they are pretty tonight.”
I snorted. If there was one survival advantage evolution had granted humanity over the many Extra Biological Entities (or E.B.E.s, as the Remnant used to call them), it was the ability to normalize the inexplicable. Six-and-a-half billion humans had died in the Rising and the survivors had learned to share their world with all manner of strange creatures—many of which had lived beside us all along.
The surviving humans still hated the Deep Ones, ghouls, mutants, and Serpent Men of the world, but their existence no longer drove an otherwise rational man to madness. Even now, a century later, we were still scraping by with all the divisions that had existed before. The members of the Morgan Trading Company were more afraid of Dunwych tribals or human raiders than they were of monsters robbing them.
“The stars are beautiful,” I admitted, smiling. “I’ve been looking at them for hours.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“I don’t sleep much anymore. Sometimes I go for weeks at a time without rest.” I was speaking literally.
“Don’t let the others hear that,” Mercury whispered, looking over at my right arm. “They might take it the wrong way.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
I flexed my right hand, feeling the immense, terrible power within it. It was bound in bandages and cloth wrappings, long sleeves as well as gloves hiding its true nature. Arcane glyphs from the Necronomicon and Book of Eibon had been branded into my flesh while juju beads bought from Dunwych mystics were spun around the hideous black chitin that covered everything from my fingertips to my arm socket. On my right shoulder, spreading alien poison through my veins, was the Hand of Nyarlathotep. It was a scar in the shape of a human hand that often glowed with an ethereal white light.
The Hand of Nyarlathotep was a symbol of being “touched” by one of the Other Gods. I had only suspicions as to how I’d acquired it, but it now defined my life. Once, I thought the strange marking had been killing me, but time had revealed it portended a more insidious fate. I was becoming something other than human.
A stronger man would have taken his own life by now, but years of serving as a soldier had left me with a tenacious desire to live. The runes and beads kept the infection at bay, albeit poorly, and I’d gotten to live a few more months with my lover. Mercury could turn her attention away from the horror within me and love me regardless. Even so, she’d terminated her pregnancy last month lest she gave birth to a monster.
“How are the spells holding up?” Mercury asked, her voice uneasy.
“Not well,” I answered, more frustrated than scared now. “They slowed its progress in the beginning but I’m not sure they’re doing anything now.”
“We could try amputating it again.”
“No.”
“John—”
“It isn’t a matter of me not wanting to be a cripple. I tried cutting off my arm with the help of a tribal warrior during the trip through the Bloch Passage, but I awoke days later covered in blood and no idea how I got there. My arm had regrown and the amount of mutated flesh had doubled.” I didn’t tell Mercury that I’d awoken with blood in my mouth and a full stomach.
“I wondered what happened on that trip,” Mercury said, reaching over to place her hand on my shoulder. “I can judge the current rate of progression and give you a rough estimate if you want but—”
“How long do I have?”
Mercury touched my right and I shifted from her. Not only because it was my cursed one but also because of how her touch felt. It was electric and excited the dark alien parts of my brain that wanted to make her my mate in a way antithetical to human love.
“You have perhaps another two or three months until the change reaches your heart.” Mercury’s expertise with E.B.E.s and mutation had allowed me to get an accurate measurement of my condition. “After that, I don’t think it will stop. It will accelerate and consume your entire body. From there, you will no longer be John Henry Booth. You will be—”
“What?” I asked, daring her to say monster.
“I don’t know.” Mercury looked away.
I didn’t want to encourage her to try and cheer me up about my condition. There was too much scientist in her still. I felt like a specimen under her microscope some nights, a creature that might survive the end days yet carry some spark of humanity. Despite this, I loved her and tolerated her eccentricities. After all, Mercury was one of the few people I trusted enough to share my torn feelings with—just not all of them.
There was a part of me that I kept from her, a part of me, a repressed and hidden part that wanted to be changed. While I no longer slept much, I still dreamed. Azathoth, Azathoth, Azathoth. The relentless repeating of the Blind Idiot God’s name was a constant in the back of my mind now. Outside the ordered universe was an amorphous blight of nethermost confusion that blasphemed and bubbled at the center of all infinity.
Surrounding it was a court of nameless otherworldly priests, bards, and courtiers of descriptions that defied conventional reason. Their hideous chanting paid homage to the End of Everything and called to me to join them in an eternal dance of nightmarish joy. I wanted to join their revelry. To be free of this dead, dusty world of causal violence and hopeless nights so I could stop caring that every day seemed to bring us closer to oblivion.
But then I wouldn’t love Mercury. I wouldn’t love anything at all. Not my daughters, my son, or my squad mates living and dead.
Monsters didn’t love.
Only humans did.
“So what are we going to do?” Mercury asked, perhaps sensing my increasing ambivalence. There were times I’d seen her stand over me, thinking I was asleep, perhaps contemplating ending my life as a form of mercy. Her hesitation made me happy, but I wasn’t sure if it was the right emotion to feel.
“I don’t know,” I said, taking a deep breath.
“We need to make a final decision before the decision is made for us. Assuming we haven’t made the decision already by waiting this long.”
“I know,” I said, the bitterness in my voice harsh and thick.
I looked over to the other caravan crew to make sure no one was listening. Those who weren’t asleep weren’t close enough to hear, a fact I found relieving. Mercury hadn’t been exaggerating about the mutant burnings. I’d seen hundreds of them killed over my four decades of life, mostly at my hands.
Was the alien blood in my veins polluting my mind? Were the visions warping my will? Would a rational, uncorrupted John Henry Booth have hesitated to kill himself if it meant saving the world from one more predator? I just didn’t know anymore.
“Will you remember me if you change?” Mercury asked. “Us? Anything?”
“Nothing could make me forget you,” I lied to her.
“I can’t kill you.” Mercury’s blue eyes blinked in the darkness. “I’ve wanted to at times, even prepared the instruments, but I can’t. I’m as addicted to you as you are to me.”
It would have been a shocking revelation coming from anyone but her. Mercury had planned for killing every member of this caravan, should they turn on us, when we’d taken this job—and all our previous employers. It was a quality I liked about her. I’d already lost friends to my impending metamorphosis. Jessica O’Reilly, a woman I’d grown up with, had turned on me and tried to kill me. I still found myself wondering if she hadn’t been the sane one among us some nights.
“Thank you,” I said, looking down at the dusty ground beneath my bedroll. “I mean that.”
“I want you to live, no matter the cost. One more monster won’t make this world any worse. Maybe you’ll be able to remember it when everything else is dead.”
The bitterness in Mercury’s voice surprised me. It shouldn’t have. Mercury wasn’t just speaking grim cynicism, but prophecy. Nyarlathotep, the Messenger of the Other Gods and the inspiration for countless divinities, had spoken to me of humanity’s fate.
Three generations.
I did not know if he meant the accumulated lifespans of three humans or sixty years, but he had been clear in the rest of his statement’s meaning. Humanity, that weak race of primates I could no longer call my own, was doomed. Extinction would claim our race after Nyarlathotep’s ambiguous deadline passed and no force in the universe would stop it. I had sworn myself against this destiny, proclaimed I could stop mankind’s destruction, but that had been hubris. How could I save humanity when I couldn’t even save myself?
I reached over to grasp Mercury’s hand with my left one. Our fingers touched. “No one knows how long we have on this world. I might be cursed to something horrible in a few months or I might die tomorrow. The condition could reverse itself as well. Where there is life, there is hope.”
Even if it was a fool’s hope.
“Damn, you’re a bundle of joy tonight.”
“I thought I was being cheerful, actually.” I gave a half-smirk.
Mercury abruptly changed subjects, still squeezing my hand. “Do you think Jackie will be all right while we’re on this trip?”
Mercury was speaking of her our adopted daughter, Jackie Howard. Jackie was living under a curse every bit as dreadful as my own, possessing the hybridized blood of human and ghoul. Like my dear lost friend, Richard Jameson, Jackie would undergo a terrible transformation when she reached her thirties and cease to be as she was. The ghouls were not an evil race, their love of human flesh aside, but she would be forever ostracized from humanity thereafter.
“We left her in a city of murderers, pimps, and slavers—she’ll be fine,” I said, smiling.
Mercury snorted. “Not funny, Booth.” She was smiling, though.
I wasn’t joking. Kingsport was a town of criminals—it was also the only civilization I trusted not to kill Jackie out of hand should her true parentage become known.
“Mister Death has promised to look after her. The Dunwych tribesmen do not think of the E.B.E.s the same way we do. They think Jackie’s blood makes her strong.”
I did not trust the tribal shaman as far as I could throw him, but I did not believe he would betray our trust. I’d saved his people last year, as much through luck as anything, and he owed me.
“I just worry about her. Jackie’s the one good thing that has come out of the past year, our relationship aside.”
“Jackie is, indeed. We had to come out here, though.” One could not survive long in the Wasteland if one didn’t have a useful skill to trade for food and water. To feed our non-traditional family around me, Mercury and I both needed to work, and caravanning was the only thing that allowed enough payment for research into a cure as well as comfortable living.
Well, that and banditry. I wasn’t about to turn desert pirate, though.
“We will be home soon,” I reassured her. “You can continue to teach Jackie all the skills she needs to be a doctor or medic.”
“Fat lot of good they’ll do her in Ghoultown.”
I snorted. “Who knows, maybe they’ll find it amusing to learn about what humans called their bones.”
“Versus supper?” Mercury said, making an unfunny joke.
I laughed anyway. “Yeah.”
“I love you, Booth.”
“I love you, too.”
I leaned over to kiss her and as our lips met, I felt a dreadful pain in my chest. Pulling away, I placed my hand over my heart and felt it beat several times faster than normal. Looking up, I stared into the darkness and saw.
In a spectrum denied the three dimensions afforded to humanity, I saw past the dusty plains we were camped on to a group coming at us. A very large group. Dozens of gray-robed figures, each holding rods of crystal, were approaching in an eerie octagonal formation.
Some were men and women.
Humans.
Others were not.
“Mercury, awaken the camp,” I said, sucking in my breath.
“Alarm!” Mercury shouted at the top of her lungs, running around the camp and waking up the guards who weren’t already on watch. “We’re under attack!”